The Science Peer Mentor program is back! Now in its 8th year, the program has been revitalised by a new structure and hopes to be bigger and better than ever!

Senior Student Mentors look after a group of new first year Science Students and help them to transition into university, giving their time and experience to support these students. This year, a greater number and more diverse array of leadership positions are also available. A new leadership team will seek to develop events, support mentors and ensure the program is both helpful for mentees and fun for mentors.

The new program includes new volunteer positions:

Event Managers: Develop and run events, as well as marketing and ensuring the program runs smoothly.

Team Leaders: Oversee large teams of mentors in subgroups of the program such as communications, evaluations and informal events.

Want to do a little bit more but don’t have time to be an Event Manager? First, apply to be a mentor. Then send an email to Taryn.Clydesdale@monash.edu for expressing your interest in leadership and previous leadership experience.

Applications for mentors close on the 1st of October, and the 14th of September for leadership roles.

Get a chance to speak to current Honours coordinators and students on Thursday, the 16th of August, at the Honours in Science Information Session.

Honours offers the unique opportunity for students to stretch their legs with a research project of their own design. For those pursuing higher study, Honours gives a chance to develop yourself for a research background. It will give you an excellent foundation for further academic pursuits. Similarly, Honours gives students an employability edge as it serves to further their communication, project management and problem-solving skills.

Depression & Addiction:
According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), approximately one in five Americans suffering with a mood disorder like depression is also battling with alcohol addiction or some other type of chronic substance abuse.

Conversely, about 20 percent of all individuals addicted to alcohol or drugs also experience some level of depression, anxiety, or other mood-related disorder.

On their own, these issues can feel absolutely debilitating and dramatically lower your quality of life. But when they’re combined, the consequences can actually be fatal.

The trilogy, Jurassic Park, and now the fourth instalment, Jurassic World, is a stroke of cinematic genius. It is probably safe to say that many share this view given the films have grossed in excess of US$1 billion dollars. Simply, it is a type of movie that you can watch over and over again and never get bored. It is a type of movie that you can rug up to on a Friday night, whilst your friends are drinking their twenties away, and you remain at home with your Ben and Jerry’s cookie and cream ice-cream. The films make you challenge what seemingly is the impossible. Even when watching Jurassic Park today, I still catch myself thinking ‘yep this could totally happen’ (even though as a scientist you should always question). The films capture the balance between an absolute lack of foresight with occasional pearls of wisdom (i.e. Ian Malcolm) and theatrical (albeit theoretically incorrect) movie science. The question that I really want to ask: can Jurassic Park really happen?

Well, several recent archaeological finds, have all originated from one remarkable site: the amber mines of northern Myanmar’s Hukawng Valley. The recent discoveries include a new species of insect, that looks more like E.T., an intact feathered tail of a small carnivorous dinosaur, and a nearly complete 99 million-year-old baby bird. Another remarkable amber discovery was a tick fossilized from the Dominican Republic that may have fed on dinosaurs. This discovery seems to have been written for a plot straight out of one of Spielberg’s movies. Like the movie, could the tick make for the cloning of dinosaurs possible?

Since amber specimens are fossils, this means that DNA will not be preserved well. In our case, we want dinosaur (‘dino’) DNA. In fact, scientists calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. This means that after 521 years, half of the bonds which link DNA would have decayed, and then in another 521 years another half, and so on. This is also increased by other factors, like the actual conditions of fossilization, such as, excessive dehydration and the dynamic changes in temperature over time. Now, this (sadly) means that after approximately 1.5 million years the sequence of DNA would be virtually unreadable and after 6.8 million years, all bonds would no longer exist, meaning that our dino DNA would not be viable to use in a cloning experiment. Of course, even if there was some dino DNA left, we would then need to replace the ‘missing’ DNA with that of an acceptable donor cell of an animal that scientists select to clone.

This means (unfortunately?) I do not think that we should be expecting a real life Jurassic Park-type reanimation any time soon. Personally, I do not fancy a Tyrannosaurus rex roaming around New York city. We, whether that be scientists or lawyers ectara, do not have some sort of ‘God-complex’ and Ian Malcolm is correct ‘life finds a way’. We simply cannot resolve nature’s resistance to control. So, for now, these amber finds are just simply fascinating. Let’s leave it at that.

It’s hard to believe but women in the 20th century were once perceived as incapable of advanced abstract thought – yet they were responsible for some of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries.

Monash University’s Faculty of Science, in conjunction with the School of Physics and Astronomy, is proud to present the international play ‘Curie, Meitner, Lamarr – Indivisible’ as part of National Science Week in August. There are 2 sessions, on the 15th and 16th of August and tickets are FREE!